The pause is longer this time.
“And him. If he turns into someone you don’t recognize after this. If a year from now, he’s a different man because we yanked him through it. What then?”
A pain tightens in my chest. “Then I find out who that is.”
Julian doesn’t say anything for a count of three.
“All right,” he says. “I’ll get you a number by three. Bridge facility, three years, fixed at our internal rate. I’m putting you on the personal guarantee, not Eclipse’s corporate paper. You understand what that means.”
“Yes,” I say without a second thought.
“It means if his gym goes under, you go under. Frost will collect on you, not your business. Personally. I want that on the record between us.”
“Understood.”
Julian releases a sigh, clearly realizing he can’t talk me out of this. “Send me the sponsor list. The ones who pulled out, with timestamps. I want to know who got the calls and when.”
“You’ll have it in an hour.”
“Theo?”
“Yes.”
“This is a beautiful thing you’re doing. I want you to remember I said that. Because the next two days are going to be very ugly, and I want there to be a moment where someone said the kind thing out loud.”
“Thanks, Julian.”
I hang up. Sit there for a minute. Look at the window. I have just put my entire adult life on the line for a man who has only just learned, after more than a year, to tell me he loves me.
I open my laptop and start typing. And work through my contact list by priority. Pride Sports Coalition first, the executive director, Maya, whom I’ve known for six years, says yes within thirty seconds. Three more queer-owned equipment manufacturers say yes, yes, andsend me everything you have.
The fourth call is to Cole Marek.
Cole runs Vault, the only queer-owned MMA-adjacent gym on the West Coast that’s pulling Guardian-tier sponsorship money. He owes me a favor from 2019, one we both know about and have never put a price on. We’ve shared meals. Slept together once, in Berlin, the kind of one-time thing that doesn’t disrupt a friendship. He’s been on a podcast with me. I am calling him for the easiest thing on my list—a public-facing endorsement:what Kaine is doing matters. Twitter, Instagram, and the OutSports interview Kennedy is going to publish on Friday.
Cole listens to my whole pitch. He doesn’t interrupt. That’s the first sign.
“Theo.” I know immediately from his tone he’s about to turn me down.
“Yeah.”
He blows out a breath. “I love you. I love you, and I love what you’re trying to do here, but I can’t put my name to this.”
“Cole.”
“Listen. Vault is twenty months from being acquired. The investors are queer, the deal is queer, the optics are everything. They have been very specific with me about contagion—that’s the word they used, contagion, the homophobes used it about us in the eighties, and now venture capital uses it about adjacent reputational risk—and I can’t be in a Twitter post next to a fightgym that’s currently the subject of seventeen syndicated bigotry segments. Not this week.”
“Three sentences, Cole.”
“I can’t. I’m sorry.”
“This is Victor Kaine you’re talking about,” I push, despite knowing once Cole’s mind is made up, he’s more fucking stubborn than me.
“I know who he is. I’m not the one with the problem here, Theo. The investors are. You’ve sat on the other side of this conversation; you know how it works. I’ll give you anything quietly. I’ll wire to a shell. I’ll talk to people you ask me to talk to. I just can’t sign my name to it before the dust settles.”
I close my eyes.
“Cole.”
